Sankey Diagram — the trend of this season

Previously, we published a post devoted to these diagrams. But it does not make it less interesting. These diagrams are irreplaceable when visualization of a flow, its direction, and its width is critical. And when such diagrams stay in mind, they are getting used more and more.

Here are more details on how to use these diagrams. There aren’t many instrument for its construction — Excel, Many Eyes and Tableu aren’t one of them. Manual construction is quite complicated — the width is hard to adjust by hand.

We found a great resource —E-Sankey. Easy-to-build instructions are on its website ; define the beginning and the end, then set a width with a number, and manipulate it. You can also choose a color and other options to it. For the sake of an experiment, we used its free version — it seems to work fine.

The example composed by developers of E-Sankey diagram — traffic load diagram, is posted below. In my opinion, there is no better way for visualization of such data.

We used these Sankey diagrams for our project. Our task was to compose a presentation on consumption and effective savings of Samara Region’s resources. In this presentation, we needed to show amounts of generated energy, its transportation process, its consumption by different groups and its looses on these stages. In my opinion, Sankey is the right choice for such tasks.

And a few more slides from this presentation to show the effectiveness of such diagrams: